Charleston Montessori celebrates the intellectual curiosity and creativity of children by
encouraging independence and self-motivation, constructive social skills, academic
development and thoughtful leadership. We are committed to being a diverse, caring
and safe community in an effort to build a tolerant, responsible and peaceful world.

Primary

Charleston Montessori offers half day and full day instructional programs. Our Primary curriculum focuses on five main areas: practical life, sensorial, language, mathematics, and cultural.

Practical Life: Exercises guide children to fulfill their own needs such as care of self, the environment, and concern for others. Concentration and coordination are developed. Grace and courtesy skills are practiced. The pride that develops as children master their own needs begins the process of taking ownership of their classroom and ultimately their learning.

Sensorial: Sensory discrimination, observation and descriptive language are developed through use of manipulative materials and exercises. These materials foster the children’s ability to categorize and organize the qualities of the world around them. In many ways, the sensorial materials also lay the foundation for introduction to mathematical concepts.

Language: Beginning with phonetic sound recognition, the child learns to read and write by connecting the letter symbol(s) to each sound, de-coding and rebuilding words using movable letters of the alphabet, and developing the coordination of the hand and wrist.

Mathematics: The children explore addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication through concrete materials such as the number rods, golden beads, skip counting bead chains and stamp games. Careful design of materials in the mathematics area and in the sensorial area lays the groundwork for future learning in algebra and geometry.

Cultural: Geography, history, music, art, physical science, and biology are introduced and explored through lessons such as globes, puzzle maps, timelines, simple experiments, artist studies and animal nomenclatures. In the spirit of inspiring peace in the world, the cultural activities help the child respect differences by showing the basic similarities of human beings and other living things. Through peacekeeping, modeling, and instruction, children learn ways to talk and listen to their peers respectfully, identify and express their feelings, and develop conflict resolution skills. As a result, the children also learn how to care for the people who make up their classroom community.